As April Fools Day approaches, I feel the need to inspire you with some ideas from my treasure trove of past pranks. I understand that not everyone sits around plotting what they might be able to do to make friends and coworkers shriek, flail, fall down, or run; I just cannot figure out why not! I have been pulling pranks for as long as I can remember. The first recipient of my efforts was my sister. She is three years younger, and that is the exact age difference between my two children. It turns out that three years is the perfect age difference to make siblings absolutely detest one another when they are young. Good times.
Some of my earliest pranks were fairly easy to set-up, yet quite effective. One that I remember is taking safety pins and pinning her pillow and all of her bedding to her mattress. Her bed looked exactly the same, but when she went to get into it at night, she could not move her pillow or her blankets or sheets. They were all pinned to the mattress. I used LOTS of safety pins. We had had to buy a whole box of them for 6th grade home economics class that year. I used the entire box on her bed. It took her forever to get into bed that night. It was hilarious.
And speaking of home ec., we had learned to do a little bit of light sewing that same year. That came in very handy. I took all of her underwear and sewed the leg holes closed. When she went to put them on, there were no holes for her legs to go through. I did that to every single pair. Unfortunately, she didn’t catch that one until right before school one morning, when she was in a hurry. That was also quite hilarious.
Sometimes I used simple office equipment to prank my sister. I took all of the washcloths in our bathroom and stapled them together in the corners, so that when you grabbed the one on top, the entire stack opened up like an accordian.
My sister, although not quite the prankster I was, did get me back a time or two. Her favorite prank was the time she took a crawfish and stuck it up into the bathtub faucet right before I took a bath. When I went to run my bath water, out came the crawfish into my bath. It did make me jump, and was pretty darn funny. I do highly recommend that one. Her other standby was to put grasshoppers into my drinking glass whenever she got the chance. I really, really dislike grasshoppers (or anything that hops- but that’s a story for another day).
I still enjoy a good prank. A few years ago, a friend and I played another one on my sister. My friend texted my sister pretending to be from Cat Facts, a group that texted out facts about cats to subscribers. At first, she sent about one fact per hour. Then she sent out a code for my sister to enter if she wished to unsubscribe. Of course, the code was not linked to anything, so it didn’t do anything. Plus, we made it super long and complicated. Then my friend texted right back saying that she had now joined Super Cat Facts and would be receiving cat facts every fifteen minutes! My sister did text me and ask me if I had subscribed her to an annoying cat facts text thing. In the meantime, my friend and I were laughing so hard that we could barely breathe. I am certain that we thought that one was way funnier than my sister did. We laughed at ourselves the whole day. I still laugh thinking about it.
I have a couple of friends that love pranks as much as I do. We pull them on other people and on each other. We laugh and laugh and laugh. We literally laugh until our faces hurt. We have done some of the silliest stuff ever. It’s all in good fun.
I can’t imagine a life without that kind of laughter. The kind of laughter that makes you forget everything. You just are lost in the moment and feel complete joy. I don’t have to prank someone to laugh like that. I can laugh like that over a funny video. I can laugh like that over a funny story someone tells me. I often laugh like that over some of the completely dumb things I do sometimes!! Life is hard and complicated, but laughing isn’t. When was the last time you really laughed? Laughed so hard your cheeks hurt? Go out and make some fun. Find some joy. Laugh!
